A Frat Bro Reviews Neighbors, Admits Zac Efron Is Hotter Than Most Men

How does the frat in the movie stack up against real life?

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In Neighbors, the fictional fraternity Delta Psi is lead by a hot (but dumb) president named Teddy (Zac Efron). How does Teddy's leadership skills, his prank-pulling, and his chapter in general stack up against a real-world fraternity? Cosmopolitan.com called up a former frat president, 25-year-old Michael Dolinger, to find out. Full disclosure: Dolinger is dating a woman on our staff (not me; we've never met and this interview was the first time I — an NYU graduate with zero frat experience — had ever spoken to him). They both attended Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., where he was the head of Delta Kappa Epsilon for half of his junior and all of his senior year. He's graduating from med school this week, then off to be a pediatric resident on Long Island. And yet he insists he's a lot like Teddy. Here's why, in his full review of the movie.

What did you think of it?I thought it was great. I'm a big fan of Seth Rogen and Zac Efron and Dave Franco, so I knew I would like it.

Did you identify with the frat in the movie?Yes, absolutely. A little more than I expected to.

What struck you most as you were watching it, where you thought, "That definitely happened to me."The overall theme of the brotherhood meaning more than anything else is definitely very true. When they have a meeting in the beginning and they discuss how they invented beer pong, they invented the boot and rally — every fraternity, including our own, invented its own form of beer pong. And when you're pledging and learning all the rituals, you learn these things and end up believing them as well.

But they were obviously myths in the movie and obviously myths you were teaching each other?Yeah, every fraternity on campus has their own myths. Everyone has their own style of drinking game as a result; no one plays the same exact drinking game.

So what was your drinking game?Ours was beer pong with paddles and four cups. At one point in the movie, you find out they keep a lot of things in Zac Efron's suite — you know, he says it's where they put valuable stuff during the parties — and he references everybody's individual pong paddle. And that's exactly right: You always keep your own original pong paddle, and they're always getting lost.

Did you custom-design these paddles?Yes. Everyone has their own custom-designed paddles that they cherish.

What did yours look like?Everybody's is usually based off their pledge name. So my pledge name was TastyKakes for the food, so I used that in decorating the paddle.

Why was your name Tastykakes?[Laughs.] Because before I went to college, I used to be on the heavier side, I would say. I used to be a little chunky. Before I went to college I got really fit, into working out, so the brothers liked to joke around with that.

But they didn't even know you when you were heavier.They had never seen me heavier, but you reveal stuff and then they use that in your pledge name to make it more meaningful.

Were you anything like Teddy as president?I would say yes and no. Fraternities are much more secretive than they were in the movie. So everybody had, like, chapter meeting rooms and a little more intense rituals, whereas their meetings in the movie were just out in the open.

So if you were so secretive, would you have moved next door to a family in a residential neighborhood? Was that part of the movie even realistic at all?Yeah, that's realistic. Our fraternities are on campus, but there are some fraternities that start in houses right next to regular other houses. There are houses all surrounding the campus.

Do they have loud parties and torment those neighbors?They do. As loud as it seemed in the movie is as loud as they get — if not louder.

But then what do the people next door do?They call the police. Everything in the movie is very relatable — like when they go out and sweet-talk the police? That happens.

Do you think it's fair — or realistic — that Teddy launched this war on the neighbors?The war is not too realistic. That's all for comedy, but we would probably get in trouble before that ever occurred.

What did your house look like?Ours was not a house shaped like that. We had a major dance floor on the bottom floor and then a separate drinking room and then all the bedrooms upstairs. It had more of a dorm feel to it. But it was a house.

Did you guys keep it clean?It was very gross. We cleaned up for parties so that girls would come over and not be totally grossed out. It was not too clean in the movie, not too clean in real life.

I thought their frat seemed really small. Was that a normal size?When I was president, our frat had 56 members. So it was bigger. But in the movie, which is accurate, not everyone lives in the house. Because you don't have enough rooms for everyone. So that might be the reason why, in the movie, it seems small.

Oh, that makes sense. So what were the other things in the movie that stood out for you?When they think the party is getting shut down [toward the end] and the cops are coming and they do the hootie hoo call and all the brothers know exactly what to do in order to get everybody out of the party in time — that is perfect to a tee. Our fraternity had an exact system where everybody knew what their job was to get 500-plus people out of the house in a minute if we knew campus safety or the police were coming to check out the party.

What was your secret call?We would have a certain number of light flashes because we were significantly louder, so a call wouldn't work.

What were the jobs?Someone would turn down the music, other people would check on the fire exits, other people would move people out of the house, other people would make sure all the alcohol was compliant. So when they do that in the movie, that is very real. And then also, I can say that there's a scene where they don't want to be on probation for their big party of the year; that is the end of the world to them — and that was also the end of the world to us. You could do nothing worse to us then put us on probation for our biggest party in the springtime.

Did that ever happen to you?We would talk to the administrator — we would get in trouble and if we were not able to have a party for eight weeks or so, but we could have that final, end-of-the-year, two-day bash where everybody comes and it's the best party ever, then we were OK with it. As long as we could negotiate that.

You actually negotiated with the administrators, then?Yes, absolutely. You realize early on that everyone wants to go to these meetings with the administrators, but some of them could wind up like that kid [in the movie] with the pot brownie, so I would just go with one of my other cabinet members.

You sound like you're smart and articulate, whereas Teddy was an airhead and he didn't go to classes very much. Do you think he seems like a capable president?Yeah, I do. There's that part in the movie where he's being filmed [by the pledge "Ass Juice"] but he doesn't know it — because they want to get him for hazing — and he ends up pulling the pledge aside and talking to him in private and being nice, letting him know that he's there for him. That alone is a major role of the president. It's tough to go through the process of getting initiated, so you do have to know the fine line of when to be tough and when to be forgiving of a pledge, and he does that very well. And then he also takes the blame at the major party for all the brothers. So it might get out of hand, but he took the brunt of the punishment for the house. It's something the president has to do sometimes.

The captain has to go down with the ship.Yeah. At one of our parties one year, we had a visiting student who somehow got into the party and he got knocked out and injured, and we had to call 911 and campus safety. This was like my worst nightmare — it was a bad scene. And I was the one who had to deal with the authorities and take the brunt of everything. It was a very difficult time.

Did you get suspended?I didn't get suspended. Just some community activities and things.

The hazing was gross. It wasn't as dangerous as I've seen it reported sometimes in the news, I guess, but it was gross. Was it accurate?I think of it more like a sports team, like when you get rookies on a sports team. Fraternity pledging and bonding is more of that nature than they portray in the movie. But there is the yelling and some gross things. I would say we had more fun with it than they do in the movie.

But you must feel some pressure to downplay hazing because fraternities get such a bad rap for them.I don't really feel the pressure to downplay any sort of hazing. I remember when I was pledging I had so much fun doing it; everything really is a team-building exercise at the core of it. Sometimes you do eat some fun stuff. But it's more psychological and less gross than in the movie. I know they did what one would call the Elephant Walk in the movie. But I don't know of anybody that actually does that. That's more of a rumor.

What was that? I didn't even understand what was going on.They're all naked and you have to hold the person in front of you, his penis — which would be the trunk of the elephant — as you walk around in the circle. That's what people think of when they think of pledging, but none of that really occurs.

Did anyone ever put a penis in a mouth while someone was sleeping, like they said in the movie?[Laughs.] No. But I did think that was a very funny line. And in terms of the destruction that occurs in the movie, that was very accurate as well. Everything does get absolutely destroyed in the house.

And then how do you pay for it?You come up with creative fundraising things. Date auctions, things like that. I remember coming back one night and my roommates ended up getting into a fight similar to the one that occurs at the end of the movie between Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, and they broke everything in the common room: coffee table, couches, everything.

When they make dildos out of their own dicks to fundraise — is that something you'd heard of?No! I wish I'd thought of that. I thought that was genius.

One of the ways that Rose Byrne manages to unhinge the whole fraternity is by making the Dave Franco character break the "bros before hoes" rule. But then it backfires because the guys forgive each other quickly. Is that how you think it would have played out?I could speak to a very similar instance in our house where we had a brother who was dating a girl and then that girl slept with another brother — basically the exact same scenario. And you do get over things through very superficial ways. They had that rhyming scene in the movie, and that was very relatable. I think the way her "bros before hoes" things backfired is the exact way it would backfire in real life.

The brothers will always choose each other.They will; they will find a way to blame it on the girl.

That's so mean.It is mean, but the brotherhood is a very special bond when you're in college.

But so is a girlfriend.Yes, it is. But the model is there for a reason, I would say.

At the end, Teddy is working as an Abercrombie model. Do a lot of former frat guys you know have terrible jobs?No. One of the benefits of being in a fraternity that they don't show there is that the alumni connections that you make through a fraternity are incredible. We have an email chain that I'm in charge of where people, as soon as there's a job opening in their company, they say, "Email me if you're interested and I'll set you up right away." So I would say that most people do not end up working as Abercrombie models.

But do most people look like Zac Efron?I think you know that answer: Most people don't look like Zac Efron.

So, last question: Did you ever have a prank war like this with neighbors?Well, we didn't have the intense prank war that they had with neighbors. But there is an intense prank war that basically takes place all the time between the brothers. The greatest prank of all time that happened in our house was someone took a shit in our vacuum cleaner. We couldn't figure out what the smell was for weeks. We cleaned out all our closets — we thought an animal died or there was mold everywhere — and the smell kept getting worse. People were almost unable to live in the house. And we kept trying to clean everything with this vacuum, and we were essentially spreading human feces everywhere, and the smell of it. And it took until my friend brought the vacuum outside to empty it out that we discovered what was going on. To this day we suspect someone, but he has not admitted to it.

But he didn't live in your house, right?He did.

Why would somebody who lived in the house shit in the vacuum?You get to see everyone suffer from your prank.